Battle of the Gretas: In Applying the Garbo Test, Why Greta Gerwig is a Bona Fide Movie Star

In a review this week, the Daily Variety film critic Peter Debruge offered as useful a definition as I’ve ever seen of what it is that makes someone a movie star, a question that thoughtful people who love film have been mulling over since at least 1910, when Florence Lawrence, the formerly anonymous “Biograph Girl,” became the film actress anyone knew by name. (A few years later, she appears to have become the first has-been, too.) That a movie star will be attractive and have a certain base-level acting talent (more would be nice, but not necessary) is a given. Beyond that—beyond “you know it when you see it”—how do you put your finger on the essence of the thing? Why Tom Cruise and not, say, C. Thomas Howell?

Debruge wasn’t trying to make some grand point about movie acting, I don’t think. He was just reviewing Lola Versus, a romantic comedy starring Greta Gerwig and The Killing’s Joel Kinnaman, which will be released in early June. But in describing Gerwig’s ability to pull the film out of a series of tailspins incurred by a wobbly script, Debruge called her “an actress who’s compelling enough doing nothing that the instant she does something, drama blooms.” Bingo! I have nothing to add, which, coming from another writer, is probably the ultimate compliment. Well, one thing, perhaps: as much as I like Greta Gerwig, I’m not sure she’s that compelling. I mean, she’s no Rebecca Hall.

(That’s another thing about movie stardom: it’s subjective. One man’s Rebecca Hall is another man’s Zoe Saldana is a third man’s Ryan Gosling.)

But Greta Garbo—she, pretty much everyone would agree, was a star. Last week I enjoyed the treat of seeing her 1933 MGM film Queen Christinaup on a great big screen, in front of several hundred mostly enraptured people, where it, or any picture, belongs. It’s a fun but spotty film, elevated by its star’s charisma, talent, craft, beauty, and physical grace, in a part that called for more kidding around than I believe her films usually allowed. Spending half her screen time in drag, Garbo plays a real-life cross-dressing 17th-century Swedish Queen, possibly bi-sexual, who abdicates for love in the middle of the Thirty Years War. The script naturally takes a few liberties; in actuality, Queen Christina left her throne for love of Catholicism, not for love of a swashbuckling Spanish envoy, played by John Gilbert, showing off his Errol Flynn–like sex appeal, and disproving the received wisdom that he stank in talkies.

Spoiler: the movie ends with Christina rendezvousing with her lover on a boat set to sail for Spain, but—oh no!—he’s been mortally wounded in a duel and dies in her arms. The light mood darkens and the film goes out on a famous single shot of Garbo standing at the bow of the ship, sailing resolutely into her uncertain future. The camera slowly dollies from the middle distance into an extreme close-up that could serve as a master class in old-school Hollywood craftsmanship: lighting, make-up, cinematography, camera movement, wind-machine, star—their combined effect is exquisite, as transcendent in its sheer artistry as any Botticelli.

Here’s the clip. To get the proper effect—and before you go meh—imagine the scene in a good print projected onto a 50-foot high screen, with the light seemingly reflecting off of Garbo’s cheekbones and spilling into the audience, and the music swelling until it fills a cavernous theater to the rafters.

Talk about being compelling while doing nothing.

And speaking of doing nothing, the film’s director, Rouben Mamoulian, shared a great anecdote about the final Queen Christina shot with George Stevens, Jr. during an interview reprinted in the latter’s book, Conversations with the Great Moviemakers of Hollywood’s Golden Ageat the American Film Institute:

“Garbo came to me and said, ‘What do I do [in the scene]?’ Indeed, what? What do you play? Do you cry? Do you have little glycerin tears? Do you smile for no reason, or do you laugh? What do you do? Therefore, I said to myself—and this works, if you do it right, it always works-- ‘I’m going to have every member of the audience write his own ending. I’m going to give him a blank piece of paper, as John Locke said, a tabula rasa. Let them write it themselves: sadness, inspiration, courage. Whatever they prefer. We prepare the scene, and they fill it in.’ So I said to Garbo, ‘Nothing. You don’t act. Do nothing. You don’t have a thought. In fact, try not to blink your eyes. Just wear a mask.” And she did just that, for ninety feet of film.

“Some people say, ‘Ah, the courage of this woman.’ Others say, ‘Oh, the sadness that is beyond tears.’ ‘Ah, the serenity.’ Everybody thought, she felt the way they wanted her to feel, so everybody’s satisfied. But actually what they’re looking at is zero. A very beautiful one, but zero.”

Which is sort of what Peter Debruge was saying: if someone can hold the screen for nearly a minute, tying movie’s emotional loose ends with a simple blank face, that’s a movie star.

Clockwise from top left: City Light, Sunset Boulevard, About Schmidt, and 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Just for fun, I’ve put together clips from a few other movies that go out on powerful close-ups—four more examples of raw, unadulterated star power. Well, 2001: A Space Odyssey doesn’t really count, but I include it because it’s my official favorite movie. And I guess you could argue that babies are the ultimate movie stars, in their parents’ eyes, anyway.